Four short links: 3 April 2019
HTML DRM, Toxic Incentives, Moral Crumple Zones, and Stats + Symbols
- The Effects of HTML’s DRM — middlemen DRM vendors can say “no” to your software playing video.
- YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant (Bloomberg) — The company spent years chasing one business goal above others: “Engagement,” a measure of the views, time spent and interactions with online videos. Conversations with over 20 people who work at, or recently left, YouTube reveal a corporate leadership unable or unwilling to act on these internal alarms for fear of throttling engagement. How you incentivize your product managers matters.
- Moral Crumple Zones: Cautionary Tales in Human-Robot Interaction — Just as the crumple zone in a car is designed to absorb the force of impact in a crash, the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component—accidentally or intentionally—that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions.
- Combining Symbols and Statistics So Machines Can Reason About What They See (MIT) — overview of a paper that combines reasoning (symbols) with perception (statistics). Combining the two is one piece of progressing AI.
